It’s May … Need We Say More?

Greetings from the North Shore, where we are captivated by the beauty of waterfalls in spring and are halfway hopeful that it will warm up soon. The ice is out on many of the lakes, good news for the fishing opener, but night temps of 32 degrees are discouraging for gardeners. On the other hand, May is actually here, and Mother’s Day is this weekend.  Yay!

On Thursday morning, there will be a 50th-anniversary celebration breakfast for Friends of the Boundary Waters at the Log Cabin Building.

The breakfast starts at 9 am. This is a free event, but RSVP to sarah@friends-bwca.org  if possible.

Also on Thursday, Jo Swanson, executive director of the Friends of the Superior National Forest, will give a presentation about the forest at the Grand Marais Public Library from 4-5 pm.

Swanson will talk about the 3-million-acre forest and all the opportunities it offers for every type of outdoor recreation. She will give a short history of the forest and explain how communities like Grand Marais are a key to making sure it’s still in good condition for future generations.

Friends of the Superior National Forest is a nonprofit organization dedicated to volunteer-powered stewardship of the Superior National Forest. They work to maintain trails, clean campsites, and restore natural areas throughout the forest’s three million acres—including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

The event is free and open to all.

And art-making continues.

Thursday is Art Counter Project Day at Joy and Company, a weekly opportunity for the community to make art at the shop. This week, the project is painting a mini-canvas. The event is held from 3 to 4:30 pm.

Everything you need will be supplied. The event is free, but donations are accepted.

On Saturday, Friends of the Superior National Forest will host a community hike at Pincushion Mountain.

The gathering will include a short walk to a scenic overlook and an opportunity to learn about local volunteer stewardship work in the Superior National Forest. Free and open to the public. The event will be held from 10-11:30 am.

For more details and registration, click here.

Also on Saturday, the Cook County Historical Society will hold a clean-up day at the Chippewa City Church to prepare for the upcoming season.

Tasks include general spring cleaning, landscaping maintenance, and checking on the progress of last year’s tree plantings.

The event will be held from 10 am to noon. The public is invited.

An Open House and Mother’s Day celebration will be held at the Tim Vahle Fine Art Gallery from 11 am to 5 pm on Saturday.

The event will offer the public an opportunity to see Vahle’s latest work. Refreshments will be served. Open to all. The gallery is located in Birch Alley, behind the Gunflint Tavern.

The 34th Annual St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour is this weekend, May 8-10, featuring 68 potters from 28 states exhibiting at seven studios in the valley.

This is a must-go-to event for pottery lovers. Each studio features new work by the potters, set up outdoors, with refreshments available at each studio. It continues through Sunday. For more info and to see who is there and the work they do, click here. (Note:  It’s a very detailed site and fun to look at all the examples of work on it.)

North House Folk School will hold Hide Week from May 12-18, featuring a variety of workshops, presentations and more, focusing on the crafts of hide and skin tanning, finishing, and sewing.

The featured guest instructors include Karl Karlsson of Sweden, Kevin Lewis and Darla Campbell of Ministikwan Lake Cree Nation (Saskatchewan), and Matt Richards from Traditional Tanners, based in Oregon. To find out more, click here.

Exhibits:

This is the last week to see the North Shore Luminescence Glow Show at Studio 21, an exhibit created by Sawtooth Mountain Elementary kindergarteners, 1st- and 2nd-graders. The artwork was inspired by the plants and animals that use bioluminescence right here, on the North Shore.

The exhibit is open on Friday from 1-5. Free. The public is invited.

The North Shore Artists’ League exhibit, Stories Beneath the Snow, continues at the Johnson Heritage Post. This is a fun and eclectic show, featuring works from a wide selection of media.

The exhibit continues through May 17.

The Heritage Post is open from 10 am to 4 pm Thursday through Saturday and from 1-4 pm Sunday. Free.

Betsy Bowen’s Art Gallery features works by a selection of local and regional artists, including books and prints by Bowen.

The gallery is currently open from 11 am to 5 pm Thursday through Saturday.

At the Duluth Art Institute, the Member Show 2026 continues, featuring work by more than 40 local and regional artists in every medium.

The Art Institute explains the exhibit this way:

“America is not a singular voice, but a chorus—layered with histories, shaped by movement, memory, and multiplicity. Art becomes the vessel through which these truths surface, each work an offering, each artist a witness.

From this understanding, we grounded our 2026 classes and exhibitions in the theme: We Hold These Truths.

This year’s Annual Member Show invites artists into that inquiry—not to resolve it, but to deepen it. Through their work, they offer reflections drawn from identity, origin, experience, and process, contributing to an evolving conversation about what American art has been, is, and might become.

These works form a living dialogue about who we are and what we hold to be true within our community. Here, we witness what happens when expression stops being polite, or when a truth unfolds rather than being announced.”

Here are a few examples:

The exhibit continues through July 10.

The exhibit, Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, continues at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

“In the first half of the 20th century, Germany experienced the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the revolution that followed, the liberal Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Modern art played an important role in the discourse of the period, and politics influenced the arts.

This exhibition features more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), the distinguished modern art museum of the Berlin State Museums. It traces the German experience in the visual arts over four decades.

Beginning with the Expressionist reaction and opposition to the conservative artistic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the exhibition moves on to the New Objectivity movement, the modern style of the 1920s. Between the wars, German artists participated in international experiments with abstraction. Painters and sculptors critiqued social currents, but most were silenced under the Nazis. This exhibition concludes with an epilogue that examines the ambiguous aftermath of World War II.” (Minneapolis Institute of Art.)

The exhibit continues through July 19.

Artists at work:

 

Walrus Hunt 1964, stone cut by Inuk artist Parr, 1893-1969.

Online  findings:

Cougar kittens have been found in northern Minnesota.

 Turn up the sound to hear their purring.

 Cougars, also known as mountain lions or pumas, are known to periodically move into or through Minnesota. Neighboring North Dakota and South Dakota (and Nebraska) have established populations in the western portions of their states. Young males and less commonly, young females, from these populations tend to wander in or through Minnesota in search of new territory and a mate.

Cougars went extinct in the state more than a century ago, and no suspected wild female cougar or kittens had previously been documented here. For Minnesota, this is the first confirmed evidence of cougar reproduction in modern history!

In order for a wildlife species to be considered a “resident” of Minnesota, there needs to be a self-sustaining breeding population. This would require multiple breeding individuals over a period of years. Monitoring efforts will be essential to determine if Minnesota becomes a home to a population of these big cats once again.

To learn more about cougars and verified past sightings, click here.

 

Giving Myself Permission– Following the Spirit, Episode 6
Filmed by Patrick Knight

 

Online Music:

 Live Music:

Photographs:

Here is a selection of photographs we found this week:

Wildlife:

Potpourri:

Landscapes, Skyscapes & Waterscapes: 

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

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Thank you!

 

 A big Thank You! to Jeremy Lopez for his Live Music schedule and tech support, and Yvonne Mills for her great proofreading. Thank you, both! And to Visit Cook County for its outstanding Events Calendar.